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The Public and the Common: Some Approximations of Their Contemporary Articulation Author(S): Andrea Mubi Brighenti Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol

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The Public and the Common: Some Approximations of Their Contemporary Articulation Author(S): Andrea Mubi Brighenti Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol The Public and the Common: Some Approximations of Their Contemporary Articulation Author(s): Andrea Mubi Brighenti Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter 2016), pp. 306-328 Published by: University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/684355 Accessed: 20-12-2015 09:12 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.205.206.85 on Sun, 20 Dec 2015 09:12:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Public and the Common: Some Approximations of Their Contemporary Articulation Andrea Mubi Brighenti 1. The Public and the Common as Territories Increasingly in recent years, the issue of the common—in its various facets of the common world, the common heritage, the commons, the creative commons, and so forth—has been explored by social theorists. The bestowal of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom has contributed to a revival of attention to common-pool resources as a viable model of self-organization different from both free-market capitalism and state centralism.1 The notion of the anthropocene, which social scientists are nowadays borrowing from geologists and ecologists, is one among many names and tags under which the issue of commonality is debated. In some radical variants, as in the texts of Antonio Negri, the common is opposed to the public and a shift from the public to the common is explic- itly advocated.2 In this text, I argue that the public and the common should not be seen as alternative dimensions of social life, much less conceptual- ized as a dichotomy. The epistemological puzzle I would like to venture into is precisely how to think the articulation of the two dimensions of the public and the common in a subtler and possibly more enriching way. Consequently, in the following discussion I propose to cast a spatial or, Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, 1990). 2. See Judith Revel and Antonio Negri, “Inventer le commun des hommes,” Multitudes, no. 31 (Winter 2008): 5–10; Michael Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). Critical Inquiry 42 (Winter 2016) © 2016 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/16/4202-0003$10.00. All rights reserved. 306 This content downloaded from 193.205.206.85 on Sun, 20 Dec 2015 09:12:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry / Winter 2016 307 better, a territorialist perspective on this issue, according to which the pub- lic and the common inhere in the formation and transformation of social territorialities. More precisely, as we’ll soon see, an integral notion of ter- ritories such as the one I have argued for elsewhere makes the term social redundant, in that every territory is nothing other than an attempt at coming to terms with what James Mark Baldwin and Pierre Janet called the socius, an attempt at establishing and sustaining certain social measures.3 The specific context in which I propose to discuss the problem of the current and coming articulations of the public and the common is formed by the twin movements of, on the one hand, the urbanization of territory and, on the other, the territorialization of the city. I call them movements precisely because neither domain is ever fully accomplished but always in the making. Rather than objects, the city and the urban are better seen as unfolding, incomplete environments. The first movement refers to the spreading of urbanization over larger geographic areas, the crisis of the classical dichotomy between urban and rural areas, and the formation of so-called urban fields and large-scale urban regions. In this context, the difference between city and countryside is increasingly reconfigured as a difference between degrees of accessibility to places that are distributed in continuous yet heterogeneous geogra- phies. The movement of the urbanization of territory is crucially related to the fact that urban space is governed and administered—an insight that was brilliantly excavated by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s.4 To govern a space means precisely to order its physical features so as to inscribe into it a series of devices to manage its population. In an old European centralist state like France, for instance, the process of urbanization of territory cor- 3. For an enlarged, counterintuitive notion of territory, see Andrea Mubi Brighenti, “On Territorology: Towards a General Science of Territory,” Theory, Culture and Society 27 (Jan. 2010): 52–72 and “Mobilizing Territories, Territorializing Mobilities,” Sociologica no. 1 (2014): 1–25. 4. See Michel Foucault, Se´curite´, territoire, population: Cours au Colle`ge de France (1977– 1978), ed. Franc¸ois Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Michel Senellart (Paris, 2004). A NDREA M UBI B RIGHENTI teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. His research focuses on space, power, and society. He is the author of The Ambiguous Multiplicities: Materials, Episteme and Politics of Cluttered Social Formations (2014) and Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research (2010), and editor of Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between (2013). He is founder of the independent online web journal lo Squaderno (www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net) and serves as coeditor of the journal Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa. This content downloaded from 193.205.206.85 on Sun, 20 Dec 2015 09:12:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 308 Andrea Mubi Brighenti / The Public and the Common responds clearly to an outward movement of gradual conquest of territory by the political center, which can be traced back to at least the eighteenth century. Through such a movement, the provincial country has been in- creasingly brought into a constituent relation with units of measurement posited by the center. The notion of scale has been deployed by social and economic geographers to account for such territorial inscriptions. For in- stance, David Harvey has argued that “what appears significant or makes sense at one scale does not automatically register at another” and that, consequently, “territorialization is...anoutcome of political struggles and decisions made in a context of technological and political-economic conditions.”5 Contemporary urbanized territory is thus sustained and sup- ported by large-scale networked infrastructures, including transportation, telecommunications, energy, water, and waste that, as a whole, enable those fundamental local interconnections of urban life, but which typically become visible only in moments of failure or collapse. In their daily exis- tence, invisible urban infrastructures are based on complex arrangement and crafty maintenance of their heterogeneous material components to be carried out in scattered, specialized calculation centers—so that, overall, territorial urban governance is attained piecemeal as a transscalar and transnetwork effort.6 The second movement, the territorialization of the city, refers to the transformation of those classical values and skills of civility, urbanity, and coexistence with diversity that, according to classic thinkers ranging from Louis Wirth, through Hannah Arendt and Erving Goffman, to Richard Sennett, define urban life.7 I speak of transformations because, as Ash Amin remarked, “in an age of urban sprawl, multiple usage of public space and proliferation of the sites of political and cultural expression, it seems odd to expect public spaces to fulfil their traditional role as spaces of civic inculcation and political participation.”8 For Amin, this implies that the 5. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, 2000), p. 75. 6. On the invisibility of infrastructures, see Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). For an application to urban systems, see Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London, 2001). On the notion of calculation center, see Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, Paris ville invisible (Paris, 1998). For an interesting application to the infrastructure of metro signage, see Je´roˆme Denis and David Pontille, Petite Sociologie de la signale´tique: les coulisses des panneaux du me´tro (Paris, 2010). 7. See Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” The American Journal of Sociology 44 (July 1938): 1–24; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958); Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York, 1971); and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1978). 8. Ash Amin, “Collective Culture and Urban Public Space,” City 12 (Apr. 2008): 5. This content downloaded from 193.205.206.85 on Sun, 20 Dec 2015 09:12:55 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry / Winter 2016 309 link between public space and politics is irredeemably broken. While sub- scribing to the same premises, my conclusions are different: indeed, the link between public space and politics remains essential to our cities. The very plethora of controversies and struggles surrounding public space amply testi- fies to this fact. What are being transformed are the notions of civility and urbanity, while a new culture of publicness suited to the new plural territori- alizations of the city is being developed in ways not yet recognized and codi- fied.
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